A social robot is a robot that interacts and communicates with humans or other autonomous physical agents by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role. We seem to accept the use of robots that perform dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. But how far do we want to go with the automation of care for children and the elderly, or the killing of terrorists? Would we be setting humanity aside if we accepted such automation? Just Ordinary Robots: Automation from Love to War provides a socially involved, yet sober, view into the new age of robots. It supplies a cutting-edge look at robot technologies, including what these technologies are capable of and the ethical and regulatory questions they raise. The book surveys the various types of social robots and examines their social significance in homes, health care, traffic, the police, and the military. Considering the technical characteristics and societal expectations of robots in these areas, it explores what is possible right now in terms of robot technologies. It also looks into the social, ethical, and regulatory issues future robot technologies will create. The text provides authoritative insights into the social significance of robots for the medium and long term. Illustrating the political, administrative, and regulatory consequences related to each area, it highlights key points that need to be publicly discussed or put on the agenda by today's politicians and policy makers.

Understanding Geometric Algebra: Hamilton, Grassmann, and Clifford for Computer Vision and Graphics introduces geometric algebra with an emphasis on the background mathematics of Hamilton, Grassmann, and Clifford. It shows how to describe and compute geometry for 3D modeling applications in computer graphics and computer vision. Unlike similar texts, this book first gives separate descriptions of the various algebras and then explains how they are combined to define the field of geometric algebra. It starts with 3D Euclidean geometry along with discussions as to how the descriptions of geometry could be altered if using a non-orthogonal (oblique) coordinate system. The text focuses on Hamilton's quaternion algebra, Grassmann's outer product algebra, and Clifford algebra that underlies the mathematical structure of geometric algebra. It also presents points and lines in 3D as objects in 4D in the projective geometry framework; explores conformal geometry in 5D, which is the main ingredient of geometric algebra; and delves into the mathematical analysis of camera imaging geometry involving circles and spheres. With useful historical notes and exercises, this book gives readers insight into the mathematical theories behind complicated geometric computations. It helps readers understand the foundation of today's geometric algebra.

From AI to Robotics: Mobile, Social, and Sentient Robots is a journey into the world of agent-based robotics and it covers a number of interesting topics, both in the theory and practice of the discipline. The book traces the earliest ideas for autonomous machines to the mythical lore of ancient Greece and ends the last chapter with a debate on a prophecy set in the apparent future, where human beings and robots/technology may merge to create superior beings - the era of transhumanism. Throughout the text, the work of leading researchers is presented in depth, which helps to paint the socio-economic picture of how robots are transforming our world and will continue to do so. This work is presented along with the influences and ideas from futurists, such as Asimov, Moravec, Lem, Vinge, and of course Kurzweil. The book furthers the discussion with concepts of Artificial Intelligence and how it manifests in robotic agents. Discussions across various topics are presented in the book, including control paradigm, navigation, software, multi-robot systems, swarm robotics, robots in social roles, and artificial consciousness in robots. These discussions help to provide an overall picture of current day agent- based robotics and its prospects for the future. Examples of software and implementation in hardware are covered in Chapter 5 to encourage the imagination and creativity of budding robot enthusiasts. The book addresses several broad themes, such as AI in theory versus applied AI for robots, concepts of anthropomorphism, embodiment and situatedness, extending theory of psychology and animal behavior to robots, and the proposal that in the future, AI may be the new definition of science. Behavior-based robotics is covered in Chapter 2 and retells the debate between deliberative and reactive approaches. The text reiterates that the effort of modern day robotics is to replicate human-like intelligence and behavior, and the tools that a roboticist has at his or her disposal are open source software, which is often powered by crowd-sourcing. Open source meta-projects, such as Robot Operating System (ROS), etc. are briefly discussed in Chapter 5. The ideas and themes presented in the book are supplemented with cartoons, images, schematics and a number of special sections to make the material engaging for the reader. Designed for robot enthusiasts - researchers, students, or the hobbyist, this comprehensive book will entertain and inspire anyone interested in the exciting world of robots.

Numerical Algorithms: Methods for Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Graphics presents a new approach to numerical analysis for modern computer scientists. Using examples from a broad base of computational tasks, including data processing, computational photography, and animation, the textbook introduces numerical modeling and algorithmic design from a practical standpoint and provides insight into the theoretical tools needed to support these skills. The book covers a wide range of topics-from numerical linear algebra to optimization and differential equations-focusing on real-world motivation and unifying themes. It incorporates cases from computer science research and practice, accompanied by highlights from in-depth literature on each subtopic. Comprehensive end-of-chapter exercises encourage critical thinking and build students' intuition while introducing extensions of the basic material. The text is designed for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in computer science and related fields with experience in calculus and linear algebra. For students with a background in discrete mathematics, the book includes some reminders of relevant continuous mathematical background.

The book provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field of gait and balance rehabilitation. It describes technologies and devices together with the requirements and factors to be considered during their application in clinical settings. The book covers physiological and pathophysiological basis of locomotion and posture control, describes integrated approaches for the treatment of neurological diseases and spinal cord injury, as well as important principles for designing appropriate clinical studies. It presents computer and robotic technologies currently used in rehabilitation, such as exoskeleton devices, functional electrical stimulation, virtual reality and many more, highlighting the main advantages and challenges both from the clinical and engineering perspective. Written in an easy-to-understand style, the book is intended for people with different background and expertise, including medical and engineering students, clinicians and physiotherapists, as well as technical developers of rehabilitation systems and their corresponding human-compute interfaces. It aims at fostering an increased awareness of available technologies for balance and gait rehabilitation, as well as a better communication and collaboration between their users and developers.

The 4th edition includes updated and additional examples and exercises on the core fundamental concepts of mechanics, robots, and kinematics of serial robots. New images of CAD models and physical robots help to motivate concepts being introduced. Each chapter of the book can be read independently of others as it addresses a seperate issue in robotics.

This book covers a wide range of topics related to human-robot interaction, both physical and cognitive, including theories, methodologies, technologies, and empirical and experimental studies. The International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR) is an annual meeting that brings together academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to present their latest, original findings on all aspects concerning the introduction of robots into everyday life. The growing need to automate daily tasks, combined with new robot technologies, is driving the development of human-friendly robots, i.e., safe and dependable machines that operate in close proximity to humans or directly interact with them in a wide range of contexts. The technological shift from classical industrial robots, which are safely kept away from humans in cages, to robots that are used in close collaboration with humans, is faced with major challenges that need to be overcome. The objective of the workshop was to stimulate discussion and exchange knowledge on design, control, safety and ethical issues concerning the introduction of robots into everyday life. The 12th installment was organized by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and took place in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

The last two decades have witnessed considerable progress in the study of underactuated robotic systems (URSs). "C""ontrol"" Design and Analysis ""for ""U""nderactuated ""R""obotic ""S""yste""ms" presents a unified treatment of control design and analysis for a class of URSs, which include systems with multiple-degree-of-freedom and/or with underactuation degree two. It presents novel notions, features, design techniques and strictly global motion analysis results for these systems. These new materials are shown to be vital in studying the control design and stability analysis of URSs.

"Control Design and Analysis for Underactuated Robotic Systems" includes the modelling, control design and analysis presented in a systematic way particularly for the following examples:

l directly and remotely driven Acrobots

l Pendubot

l rotational pendulum

l counter-weighted Acrobot

2-link underactuated robot with flexible elbow joint

l variable-length pendulum

l 3-link gymnastic robot with passive first joint

l n-link planar robot with passive first joint

l n-link planar robot with passive single joint

double, or two parallel pendulums on a cart

l 3-link planar robots with underactuation degree two

2-link free flying robot

The theoretical developments are validated by experimental results for the remotely driven Acrobot and the rotational pendulum.

"C""ontrol"" Design and Analysis ""for ""U""nderactuated ""R""obotic ""S""yste""ms" is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in the area of control systems, mechanical and robotics systems, nonlinear systems and oscillation. This text will not only enable the reader to gain a better understanding of the power and fundamental limitations of linear and nonlinear control theory for the control design and analysis for these URSs, but also inspire the reader to address the challenges of more complex URSs."

The ?rst International Meeting of Advances in Robot Kinematics, ARK, occurred in September 1988, by invitation to Ljubljana, Slovenia, of a group of 20 int- nationally recognized researchers, representing six different countries from three continents. There were 22 lectures and approximately 150 attendees. This success of bringing together excellent research and the international community, led to the formation of a Scienti?c Committee and the decision to repeat the event biannually. The meeting was made open to all individuals with a critical peer review process of submitted papers. The meetings have since been continuously supported by the Jozef ? Stefan Institute and since 1992 have come under patronage of the Inter- tionalFederationforthePromotionofMechanismandMachineScience(IFToMM). Springer published the ?rst book of the series in 1991 and since 1994 Kluwer and Springer have published a book of the presented papers every two years. The papers in this book present the latest topics and methods in the kinem- ics, control and design of robotic manipulators. They consider the full range of - botic systems, including serial, parallel and cable driven manipulators, both planar and spatial. The systems range from being less than fully mobile to kinematically redundant to overconstrained. The meeting included recent advances in emerging areas such as the design and control of humanoids and humanoid subsystems, the analysis, modeling and simulation of human body motion, the mobility analysis of protein molecules and the development of systems which integrate man and - chine.

Over the next few decades, millions of people, with varying backgrounds and levels of technical expertise, will have to effectively interact with robotic technologies on a daily basis. This means it will have to be possible to modify robot behavior without explicitly writing code, but instead via a small number of wearable devices or visual demonstrations. At the same time, robots will need to infer and predict humans' intentions and internal objectives on the basis of past interactions in order to provide assistance before it is explicitly requested; this is the basis of imitation learning for robotics. This book introduces readers to robotic imitation learning based on human demonstration with wearable devices. It presents an advanced calibration method for wearable sensors and fusion approaches under the Kalman filter framework, as well as a novel wearable device for capturing gestures and other motions. Furthermore it describes the wearable-device-based and vision-based imitation learning method for robotic manipulation, making it a valuable reference guide for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning, and for researchers interested in wearable computing and robotic learning.

Provides a comprehensive introduction to multi-robot systems planning and task allocation; Explores multi robot aerial planning, flight planning, orienteering and coverage, and deployment, patrolling, and foraging; Includes real-world case studies; Treats different aspects of cooperation in multi-agent systems.

There are many myths and mistakes which make the topics of artificial intelligence complex and confusing. But the truth is that the foundations of AI are not rocket science. People do not need a PhD to understand how a basic neural network works. In fact, one does not even need computer skills to learn this. Cunning Machines: Your Pocket Guide to the World of Artificial Intelligence explains the main concepts: what does AI really mean, where do we find it, how do scientists try to evaluate it, what are its main limitations and what future we can expect with it? It also describes the most popular AI techniques in an easy-to-digest form: Artificial neural networks Genetic algorithms The Monte Carlo method Natural language processing Ontologies and their applications This book is for everyone. Still, it may be especially valuable to teachers who wish to enrich their classes with some interesting and popular topics, sales managers and business analysts who wish to better understand the IT world, and finally politicians and journalists who take part in debates on the latest technologies. Jedrzej Osinski earned a PhD in artificial intelligence, has worked on government grants and has published 14 scientific papers to date. He is also the co-author of two books. At the same time, he has over ten years of experience working in IT companies of different sizes, domains (the web, telecoms, banking, e-learning), organisation structures and locations (Poland, Ireland and the UK). He is also involved in various initiatives promoting AI, science and modern technologies including blog posts, invited talks and TV and radio appearances

This book is the eight volume of a sub-series on Road Vehicle Automation, published as part of the Lecture Notes in Mobility. Written by researchers, engineers and analysts from around the globe, the contributions are based on oral and poster presentations from the Automated Vehicles Symposium (AVS) 2020, held on July 27-30, 2020, as a fully virtual event. The book explores public sector activities, human factors aspects, vehicle systems and other related technological developments, as well as transportation infrastructure planning, which are expect to foster and support road vehicle automation.

This book introduces readers to essential technology assessment and forecasting tools, demonstrating their use on the basis of multiple cases. As organizations in the high-tech industry need to be able to assess emerging technologies, the book presents cases in which formal decision-making models are developed, providing a framework for decision-making in the context of technology acquisition and development. Applications of different technology forecasting tools are also discussed for a range of technologies and sectors, providing a guide to keep R&D organizations abreast of technological trends that affect their business. As such, the book offers a valuable the theoretical and practical reference guide for R&D managers responsible for emerging and future technologies.

This book is a timely report on current neurotechnology research. It presents a snapshot of the state of the art in the field, discusses current challenges and identifies new directions. The book includes a selection of extended and revised contributions presented at the 2nd International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics (NEUROTECHNIX 2014), held October 25-26 in Rome, Italy. The chapters are varied: some report on novel theoretical methods for studying neuronal connectivity or neural system behaviour; others report on advanced technologies developed for similar purposes; while further contributions concern new engineering methods and technological tools supporting medical diagnosis and neurorehabilitation. All in all, this book provides graduate students, researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of neurotechnologies with a unified view of the field, thus fostering new ideas and research collaborations among groups from different disciplines.

Consider this: Robots will one day be able to write poetry and prose so touching that it will make men weep; compose dozens or even hundreds of symphonies that will rival the work of Mozart; judge a court case with absolute impartiality and fairness; or even converse with the natural ease of your best friend. Robots will one day be so life-like that a human could fall in love and marry one. Thought provoking and controversial? Certainly. Far-fetched? Not at all. David Levy presents the history of Artificial Intelligence, considers recent developments, and speculates about the future of AI. A complete bibliography is available here.

The author compiles everything a student or experienced developmental engineer needs to know about the supporting technologies associated with the rapidly evolving field of robotics. From the table of contents: Design Considerations * Dead Reckoning * Odometry Sensors * Doppler and Inertial Navigation * Typical Mobility Configurations * Tactile and Proximity Sensing * Triangulation Ranging * Stereo Disparity * Active Triangulation * Active Stereoscopic * Hermies * Structured Light * Known Target Size * Time of Flight * Phase-Shift Measurement * Frequency Modulation * Interferometry * Range from Focus * Return Signal Intensity * Acoustical Energy * Electromagnetic Energy * Optical Energy * Microwave Radar * Collision Avoidance * Guidepath Following * Position-Location Systems * Ultrasonic and Optical Position-Location Systems * Wall, Doorway, andCeiling Referencing * Application-Specific Mission Sensors

The primary aim of this volume is to provide researchers and engineers from both academic and industry with up-to-date coverage of new results in the field of robotic welding, intelligent systems and automation. The book is mainly based on papers selected from the 2020 International Conference on Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation (RWIA'2020) in Shanghai and Lanzhou, China. The articles show that the intelligentized welding manufacturing (IWM) is becoming an inevitable trend with the intelligentized robotic welding as the key technology. The volume is divided into four logical parts: Intelligent Techniques for Robotic Welding, Sensing of Arc Welding Processing, Modeling and Intelligent Control of Welding Processing, as well as Intelligent Control and its Applications in Engineering.

This book tackles all the stages and mechanisms involved in the learning of manipulation tasks by bimanual robots in unstructured settings, as it can be the task of folding clothes. The first part describes how to build an integrated system, capable of properly handling the kinematics and dynamics of the robot along the learning process. It proposes practical enhancements to closed-loop inverse kinematics for redundant robots, a procedure to position the two arms to maximize workspace manipulability, and a dynamic model together with a disturbance observer to achieve compliant control and safe robot behavior. In the second part, methods for robot motion learning based on movement primitives and direct policy search algorithms are presented. To improve sampling efficiency and accelerate learning without deteriorating solution quality, techniques for dimensionality reduction, for exploiting low-performing samples, and for contextualization and adaptability to changing situations are proposed. In sum, the reader will find in this comprehensive exposition the relevant knowledge in different areas required to build a complete framework for model-free, compliant, coordinated robot motion learning.

This book presents improved and extended versions of selected papers from EUROGEN 2019, a conference with interest on developing or applying evolutionary and deterministic methods in optimization of design and emphasizing on industrial and societal applications.

This book offers a comprehensive review of collision avoidance techniques and safe trajectory planning for manned and unmanned ships, together with extensive information on how to develop and implement algorithms for applications in real-world settings. It describes the most relevant decision-support systems and guidance systems used in the control of marine craft, giving a special emphasis to autonomous vehicles, but also covering manned ones. Thanks to its good balance of theory and practice, and the inclusion of basic explanations of all essential concepts, this book fills an important gap in the literature of marine navigation, providing not only researchers and practitioners with a timely reference guide to safe trajectory planning, but also supporting students and newcomers to the field.

This book describes a unique approach to bring robotic technology into elders' daily lives. Low cost components and low cost robotic assistants are effectively combined to offer high quality services to elders and people in need. The book presents in a comprehensive way how technology can be used for developing a new healthcare paradigm where high quality services are offered at home, thus reducing the ever-increasing hospitalization cost of the elders and the people with chronic diseases.

In this book, we have set up a unified analytical framework for various human-robot systems, which involve peer-peer interactions (either space-sharing or time-sharing) or hierarchical interactions. A methodology in designing the robot behavior through control, planning, decision and learning is proposed. In particular, the following topics are discussed in-depth: safety during human-robot interactions, efficiency in real-time robot motion planning, imitation of human behaviors from demonstration, dexterity of robots to adapt to different environments and tasks, cooperation among robots and humans with conflict resolution. These methods are applied in various scenarios, such as human-robot collaborative assembly, robot skill learning from human demonstration, interaction between autonomous and human-driven vehicles, etc. Key Features: Proposes a unified framework to model and analyze human-robot interactions under different modes of interactions. Systematically discusses the control, decision and learning algorithms to enable robots to interact safely with humans in a variety of applications. Presents numerous experimental studies with both industrial collaborative robot arms and autonomous vehicles.

What is transhumanism? Simply put, it is a movement whose aim is to use technology to fundamentally change the human condition, to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other, and better, than the animals we are. It's a philosophy that, depending on how you look at it, can seem hopeful, or terrifying, or absurd. In To Be a Machine, Mark O'Connell presents us with the first full-length exploration of transhumanism: its philosophical and scientific roots, its key players and possible futures. From charismatic techies seeking to enhance the body to immortalists who believe in the possibility of 'solving' death; from computer programmers quietly re-designing the world to vast competitive robotics conventions; To Be a Machine is an Adventure in Wonderland for our time. To Be a Machine paints a vivid portrait of an international movement driven by strange and frequently disturbing ideas and practices, but whose obsession with transcending human limitations can be seen as a kind of cultural microcosm, a radical intensification of our broader faith in the power of technology as an engine of human progress. It is a character study of human eccentricity, and a meditation on the immemorial desire to transcend the basic facts of our animal existence - a desire as primal as the oldest religions, a story as old as the earliest literary texts.A stunning new non-fiction voice tackles an urgent question... what next for mankind?

This book provides theoretical and practical knowledge on AI and swarm intelligence. It provides a methodology for EA (evolutionary algorithm)-based approach for complex adaptive systems with the integration of several meta-heuristics, e.g., ACO (Ant Colony Optimization), ABC (Artificial Bee Colony), and PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), etc. These developments contribute towards better problem-solving methodologies in AI. The book also covers emerging uses of swarm intelligence in applications such as complex adaptive systems, reaction-diffusion computing, and diffusion-limited aggregation, etc. Another emphasis is its real-world applications. We give empirical examples from real-world problems and show that the proposed approaches are successful when addressing tasks from such areas as swarm robotics, silicon traffics, image understanding, Vornoi diagrams, queuing theory, and slime intelligence, etc. Each chapter begins with the background of the problem followed by the current state-of-the-art techniques of the field, and ends with a detailed discussion. In addition, the simulators, based on optimizers such as PSO and ABC complex adaptive system simulation, are described in detail. These simulators, as well as some source codes, are available online on the author's website for the benefit of readers interested in getting some hands-on experience of the subject. The concepts presented in this book aim to promote and facilitate the effective research in swarm intelligence approaches in both theory and practice. This book would also be of value to other readers because it covers interdisciplinary research topics that encompass problem-solving tasks in AI, complex adaptive systems, and meta-heuristics.